


An 'I Love You' That You Can Understand

by haraya



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Language Barrier, Languages and Linguistics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-30
Updated: 2016-06-30
Packaged: 2018-07-19 06:47:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7350181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/haraya/pseuds/haraya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The hard part about 'I love you' is learning how to say it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An 'I Love You' That You Can Understand

**Author's Note:**

> Quick piece I dashed off on a whim, hence the very rushed writing. Please also note that I am not a linguist, like, at all. Therefore, most language-related jargon in the following work is more or less BS. You have been warned.

Garrus is talking to Shepard about the new Thanix they've just installed when it occurs to him that he doesn't know what she sounds like.  
  
Unaware, she continues on her vocal hypothesizing on the canon's power draw and how it could affect their current systems, and Garrus is struggling to listen to her while being mesmerized by the movement of her lips that don't quite match the sounds coming through his translator. He realizes that he's never heard her voice without the layered quality of the translation protocol, and he wonders what he's missing - if her voice is richer, rounder without the paradoxical translation barrier, if she does actually trill the _r_ and draws out the _s_ in his name like his native tongue does, if her mouth can even form the subtle shape changes that make up the turian _I love you._  
  
Dangerous territory, this.  
  
"Garrus?"  
  
He's jolted back from the heights he'd let his mind go wandering, and feels vaguely disoriented when he realizes he's still in the battery.  
  
"Yes?" he says.  
  
"You weren't listening," she says, not a question.  
  
And that's not true, not quite - he was _plenty_ listening, just maybe not paying as much attention to _what_ she was saying as much as he was to _how_ she was saying it. He finds he's fascinated by the way her lips curve differently for each syllable she utters, even if they aren't the ones he gets to hear through the translator.  
  
But she doesn't need to know that, so he goes with, "Yeah, sorry."  
  
"You were probably already running calibrations in your head for this baby, weren't you?"  
  
Oh, he most definitely _wasn't._  
  
Not... _consciously,_ anyway. She doesn't need to know _that_ either.  
  
Instead, he says, "Yeah."  
  
"Called it."  
  
He feels slighted, somehow, like he needs to defend his completely justifiable work of ensuring their guns don't blow up in their faces. "It's just that the Thanix is something else, Shepard. It can take out a Collector ship, alright, but fire it one too many times and it'll--"  
  
_"Garrus."_  
  
He shuts up at her tone but is rendered speechless by her expression - a fond, exasperated smile somewhere between _what am I going to do with you_ and _what would I do without you._  
  
And it's a good thing Shepard doesn't understand turian subharmonics because his are going haywire - alternating between frequencies too low for her to hear, shifting from something that says _your smile is killing me_ and _don't stop, ever._  
  
"Yeah?"  
  
"Don't you have to be in the middle of some calibrations?" she asks, one side of her mouth tilted up in a smirk.  
  
"Not... right now," he says, feeling faintly bewildered and slightly disappointed at the implied dismissal.  
  
"Well, knowing you, you'd probably want to be, anyway," she says flippantly, stretching her arms over her head as she makes to leave.  
  
Clearly she doesn't know him as well as she thinks.  
  
"Talk to you later, Garrus," she says.  
  
And he replies, "I'll be here if you need me," which is to say, _you don't really need to go_ and _don't leave me behind,_ but the subtleties of turian language are lost on Shepard's one-tone hearing.

  
  
\---

  
  
After the Collector Base, after Aratoht, after the not-quite-awkwardness that kickstarted their fledgling relationship, Shepard finds him in the battery.  
  
The ship has gotten steadily quieter as the crew decreases in number - Tali escorted back to the flotilla, Grunt dropped off on Tuchanka, Legion allowed to literally walk out of the airlock into deep space just outside the Perseus Veil.  
  
They'd just left the Citadel after dropping off the rest - Thane and Samara and Jack and Mordin, and all the Cerberus crew who'd wanted to get off before Shepard goes crawling back to the Alliance like a good little scapegoat, and now he, Joker, Chakwas, and EDI are all that's left, and he's getting off at Palaven the day after next.  
  
It rankles him on Shepard's behalf that she's to be put on trial for doing what the Alliance didn't have the guts to do themselves; it rankles that she's going willingly like some sacrificial lamb. But most of all it rankles that she'd expressly forbidden him to go with her.  
  
Hence, the looming specter of Palaven a little more than a day ahead. But there are _some_ perks; with most of the crew gone, he and Shepard don't have to hide.  
  
"I love you," she tells him.  
  
His hands still on the console, and he turns to face her in the dim light of the battery.  
  
"Say that again?" he says, a little breathless.  
  
She smiles. "I love you."  
  
With shaky fingers he turns off his translator and says, fighting back the swell of emotion that forms a block in his throat, "Again, please."  
  
"I love you," she says, and he hears it as she says it: an _aiye_  sound like the one turian mothers make when they coo at newborns; a sound like the second syllable in Palaven, but not quite - it reminds him of home, but not really, so he decides _love_ means _almost home_ instead; and a soft whisper, a breath of _yuu,_ like the first syllable in _young_ and _beside_ and _right._  
  
"I love you," he repeats in human, partly to himself and mostly for her, like everything else worthwhile he's done in his life - all, all for her.  
  
It makes her smile, and he thinks it's worth it; she smiles at him like _he's_ worth it and he doesn't quite care right now if it's true. He will, later, but right now he only has enough room in his head for mothers and newborns, for _almost home,_ for his being young and beside her and this being absolutely right.

  
  
\---

  
  
Victus calls him out in the war room.  
  
After Shepard's left, after she's gently brushed off Garrus' careful, "You need to get some rest," (while his subharmonics say: _Spirits, I've missed you_ and _I'm right here, talk to me_ and _I love you_ ), he turns to the Primarch and is met with a vicious grin slashing across the older turian's face.  
  
"So it's _'You need to get some rest,'_ is it?" he asks. It's an obvious enough rib that even the other humans in the war room get it - Garrus swears the closest one _snickers_ and he makes a mental note to exact some sort of revenge later.  
  
But it's not the words that bother him, oh no. It's Victus' subharmonics, an exact replica of Garrus' when he'd spoken those words to Shepard - tones that meant _I missed you, I'm here, I love you._  
  
Like mothers and newborns, like _almost home,_ like young and beside and right.  
  
"What?" Garrus says. (With all due respect, sir, it's none of your business.)  
  
"It's... interesting," Victus replies. (Oh, Spirits, this is just _hilarious._ )  
  
"Is it?" (Fuck off.)  
  
"Oh, yes." (Fuck _her,_ why don't you?)  
  
Garrus just growls, low in his throat. (Drop. It. _Sir._ )  
  
Victus laughs, loud, a genuinely mirthful sound at odds with the war going on around them. (You're blushing, Vakarian.)  
  
"Hmph," Garrus says. (Am not.)  
  
"To work, then, shall we?" Victus says, grinning. (Oh, you most definitely are.)  
  
Garrus doesn't deign to grace his superior with a reply, but he does tap away at the console with a little more force than necessary.

  
  
\---

  
  
When Shepard chases him back to the Normandy and tells him _I love you_ in human, he has just enough time to reach out and quickly shut off her translator before he says, voice strained with pain from his injuries and pain from the inevitable parting, "I love you, too."  
  
In turian, _I love you_ is just two words. I love this, I love that, I love him/her are all three words or more, but _I love you_ only has two. In turian there is a single word for _me_ and _you._ Garrus likes it because _you and I_ are together, because _you and I_ sound strange and _wrong_ when apart.  
  
So he tells her _I love you_ in just two words, one for love and one for you and I, because at least in this, they can stay together.  
  
She's already backing down the ramp, already stepping onto the crumbling, blood-slick London streets. "Go!" she shouts, and then the shuttle bay door closes and Garrus is left alone in the dark of the cargo hold, his mind filled with mothers and newborns, with _almost home,_ feeling unnaturally aged by the wrongness of not being at her side.  
  
He knows she heard him. He hopes she understood.

  
  
\---

  
  
On an uncharacteristically bright London morning, this is what Garrus wakes up to: he opens his eyes and Shepard's smiling at him from the hospital bed; the sun is streaming in through the window to play in the strands of her hair; her eyes are ringed with dark shadows but they're open and there's light dancing somewhere in them, like a distant candle in the window on a very dark night when he's lost his way.  
  
He's gaping. He knows he is. There is a telltale slackness to his jaw that's telling him it's fallen open, there is an empty feeling in his lungs that's telling him to _breathe,_ dammit, but it's hard, because she's-- she's _here_ and _awake_ and fucking _beautiful._  
  
She laughs, the sound little more than a scratch in her throat, and it startles him out of his reverie. But. Only a little.  
  
"Shepard," he says, forcing her name out of his too-tight throat.  
  
She cocks her head, curious, and then says, "Say that again?"  
  
Confused and not a little worried, he obliges: "Shepard?"  
  
She stares at him for a moment longer than what he thinks is absolutely necessary, unknowingly sending his heart rate through the roof.  
  
"Huh," she says. "Never realized you were saying my name funny all this time. It's kind of cute."  
  
Garrus looks at her, and the confusion must be written clear across his face, because Shepard smiles and explains, "You're not pronouncing the 'p' properly. Probably because you don't actually _have_ lips to pronounce it with, I know, but--"  
  
His head is spinning. He's spent the past few months waiting for his girlfriend to wake up from a coma he'd feared was permanent, and now that she has, she's talking linguistics and telling him he's been getting her name wrong for years.  
  
He isn't even sure what a 'pee' is.  
  
"Shepard, _what_ are you talking about?" he rumbles out.  
  
She stops, stares a little, confusion and fascination warring on her features. "Ah," she says finally, faintly embarrassed. "I'm afraid I didn't get that, big guy. I probably should have worked on my turian language skills in between missions, huh?"  
  
_Oh,_ Garrus thinks as it finally clicks. She hasn't got her omni-tool, and by extension, her translator. Their conversation has been pretty one-sided, and he's just now realizing exactly which side it was skewed towards.  
  
It's a handicap, but not something he can't work around.  
  
"I love you," he says, enunciating the foreign words carefully, filling them with meaning, with feeling, with turian mothers and newborns and _almost home,_ with young and beside and right.  
  
Shepard inhales sharply in surprise, a soft sound magnified by emotion and the quietness of the empty room. "Damn," she says, a little breathless. "Now I _really_ feel bad about not working on my turian language skills between missions."  
  
Garrus laughs. He's a little lightheaded from joy, from relief, from the utter absurdity of the situation, but when he manages to wrestle down his mirth into a quiet chuckle, he says again, "I love you."  
  
Shepard smiles. "I love you, too."  
  
And nothing else needs to be said.

**Author's Note:**

> For anyone who's curious, the Latin words/roots for "young", "beside", and "right" (as in "law") are "iuvenis", "iuxta-", and "ius", respectively.
> 
> Yeah, pretty much BS.


End file.
